Mark Twain

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

- Mark Twain

Saturday, September 28, 2013

LIFE Behind the Picture: Pablo Picasso ‘Draws’ With Light

When LIFE magazine’s Gjon Mili, a technical prodigy and lighting innovator, visited Pablo Picasso in the
South of France in 1949, it was clear that the meeting of these two
artists and craftsmen was bound to result in something extraordinary.
Mili showed Picasso some of his photographs of ice skaters with tiny
lights affixed to their skates, jumping in the dark — and the Spanish
genius’s ever-stirring mind began to race.

“Picasso” LIFE magazine reported at the time, “gave Mili 15 minutes
to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed
for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek
profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened
room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By
leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through
space.”

This series of photographs, known ever since as Picasso’s “light
drawings,” were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in
effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created — and yet they
still live, six decades later, in Mili’s playful, hypnotic images. Many
of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art.
Finally, while the “Picasso draws a centaur in the air” photo that
leads off this gallery is rightly celebrated, many of the images in this
gallery are far less well-known — in fact, many of them never ran in
the magazine. But they are no less thrilling, after all these years,
than the iconic picture of the archetypal creative genius of the 20th
century crafting, on the fly, an at-once fleeting and enduring work of
art.A note on the last image in the gallery: An excerpt
from a 1968 special issue of LIFE, devoted entirely to Picasso,
describes a typical scene at his home: “Putting on a mask is sometimes
enough to set Picasso off into a kind of witch-doctor frenzy. He roars
and writhes behind his gorilla mask, dances away to the mirror, returns
in a rubber devil’s mask to swoop down on his daughter Paloma. Picasso
was one of the first European artists to recognize the magic and beauty
of African masks, and his own masks show the enduring power of that
early influence.”
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